The Many Battles of Harry Belafonte

Two days before his landslide victory in the mayoral election, Bill de Blasio received an endorsement that placed him in the company of John F. Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and Hugo Chávez. Before a packed sanctuary at the First Corinthian Baptist Church, in Harlem, Harry Belafonte—eighty-seven years old and using a cane, but possessed of undiminished elegance—spoke for fifteen minutes on behalf of the candidate. His endorsement, a bit of extemporized eloquence, detoured into a denunciation of the Koch brothers as contemporary Klansmen, “men of evil” who must be stopped. The proximity of Belafonte’s remarks to Election Day spared de Blasio a Jeremiah Wright-level debacle, but he did issue an apology. (That a Belafonte endorsement would require an apology to offended parties from its intended beneficiary is an entirely predictable turn of events.)

We’ve become accustomed to the inflammatory pronouncements of late-stage celebrity males—Charlton Heston, Bill Cosby, Clint Eastwood—though their evolution into conservatives, curmudgeons, or cranks is usually explained as a function of age. Belafonte offers a variation on the theme: the senior celeb who grows more radical with time. His excoriation of George W. Bush as “the greatest terrorist in the world” was later revised, but only, Belafonte said, because he hadn’t met all the other terrorists. Last summer, he criticized Jay Z and Beyonce for their meagre social-justice efforts and sparked, among other things, a cross-generational Twitter fight within black America. During the 2008 election, his criticism of Barack Obama was so lacerating that the Senator asked him, “When are you going to cut me some slack?” Belafonte replied, “What makes you think that’s not what I’ve been doing?”

Belafonte’s embrace of Chávez led, indirectly, to his being disinvited from the funeral of his close friend Coretta Scott King by her children, whom he is currently suing. The King children are a litigious lot, and the three siblings have engaged in a good deal of semi-public feuding, but the clash with Belafonte, however foreseeable, is a disturbing one. Their zealous stewardship of their father’s legacy has always skewed toward protecting its monetary value, while Belafonte very much sees himself as a keeper of the movement’s insubordinate idealism. As a young man, Belafonte befriended Martin Luther King, Jr., and invested, quite literally, in the movement he led. The present legal battle concerns the ownership of several documents that belonged to Belafonte, including handwritten notes for a speech King was planning to deliver in Memphis which were in his pocket on the day he was assassinated. Belafonte put the items up for auction in 2008, intending to donate the proceeds to an anti-gang-violence charity; the King children successfully blocked the auction, and he is now suing to establish his ownership of the materials.

Belafonte, who considered King one of his best friends, never reconciled himself to King’s posthumous transition from symbol to brand. In his 2011 memoir, he wrote, of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change:

Nobel laureates are welcomed; younger, more cutting-edge scholars are not vigorously pursued. Now, under the leadership of Martin’s children, it is basically a crypt with a reflecting pool, selling trinkets and memorabilia and books to tourists and students.

Belafonte’s indignation is only partly fuelled by loyalty to his martyred friend. He’s also a man whose largesse underwrote a great deal of the work undertaken by King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He purchased the life-insurance policy that was Coretta Scott King’s sole source of income following her husband’s assassination, and personally supported the family in the wake of the death. In 1955, Belafonte promised King that he would help the movement in any way he could; thirteen years later, he was helping King’s widow pick out the suit he’d be buried in, and sitting next to her at the funeral service. Thirty-eight years later, King’s children were withdrawing his invitation to their mother’s funeral, presumably to avoid offending one of the other guests, George W. Bush.

There may be an inverse principle that works in history, in which the measure of one’s significance can be determined by the status of one’s nemeses. By that scale, Belafonte is indispensable. No minor figure manages to alienate the President of the United States, a pair of politically powerful billionaire siblings, the country’s reigning entertainment power couple, and the scions of the most revered American activist of the twentieth century. Those are just the beefs Belafonte has ignited in his eighties.

The line running through all these episodes is that, while it may be a curse to live in interesting times, it’s more painful to live in ironic ones. Belafonte’s central conflict is not with any of these individuals but, rather, with the ethos that produced them. A younger Belafonte almost certainly imagined that, as he grew older, his once-audacious political beliefs would increasingly be seen as moderate—the impossible demands of one generation becoming the overlooked entitlements of the next. Instead, history looks to have flowed in the opposite direction, and he now finds himself worried that the causes for which he sacrificed yielded fragile gains, whose imperilled state is all the more difficult to realize after the election of a black President. Belafonte now occupies a bitterly ironic position, an octogenarian radical whose politics are well to the left of many people half his age.

Belafonte’s relationship with Chávez soured when he concluded that the regime was using his efforts to create trade opportunities between poor Venezuelan farmers and low-income communities in America as a cynical ploy to embarrass the United States. If nothing else, Belafonte has consistently chosen principle over pragmatism—which suggests that his endorsement is an ambivalent blessing for a politician. De Blasio is still enjoying the crush of elated attention that comes with an overwhelming victory, but, sooner or later, he will start to make the difficult decisions that come with the mayoralty. De Blasio may yet retain his blessing, but one thing is certain: Belafonte will not hesitate to let him know when it’s been lost.